Principal Cloud Engineer

Title

Principal Cloud Engineer

Location

Rockville, MD (hybrid preferred, open to remote for exceptional candidates)

Target Start Date

Type

Salary / Pay Rate

Why Work Here

This is an established life sciences company whose AWS platform supports manufacturing, commercial, CRO, and SaaS business lines, so the cloud team's work touches every part of the business. You would lead the Cloud Engineering and DevOps teams as a player-coach, setting direction and developing engineers while staying hands-on in the code. You would own the cloud platform roadmap and partner with IT leadership on multi-year planning and investment, giving you real influence over where the platform goes. The environment is modern, covering infrastructure as code, containers, SRE practices, and AI-assisted tooling. It is a stable, regulated organization that treats security and quality as engineering disciplines.

About the Role

This role leads the design, build, operation, and continuous improvement of the organization's AWS cloud platform across manufacturing, commercial, CRO, and SaaS business segments. Operating as a player-coach, the Principal Cloud Engineer provides technical direction, sets standards, and develops engineers while staying deeply hands-on in architecting cloud infrastructure, automating delivery pipelines, and supporting production workloads. The position leads the Cloud Engineering and DevOps teams and partners closely with business stakeholders, Cybersecurity, Enterprise Systems, Software Engineering, product teams, and the CRO organization. It champions automation, secure-by-design infrastructure, GxP and 21 CFR Part 11 alignment, and measurable business outcomes from the cloud investment. The role reports to the Director of Enterprise Systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and develop the Cloud Engineering and DevOps teams by setting technical direction, establishing engineering standards and runbooks, running performance management and career development conversations, and recruiting and onboarding new talent.
• Architect, build, and operate a multi-account AWS environment using AWS Organizations, Control Tower, and a landing zone reference architecture, designed for high availability, security, scalability, and recoverability.
• Stay deeply hands-on by writing and reviewing production Terraform, building CI/CD pipelines, debugging production incidents, tuning cluster and database performance, and contributing code the team will rely on for years.
• Own and evolve the Infrastructure as Code standard (Terraform preferred, with CloudFormation and CDK as needed), including module libraries, state management, branching and review patterns, and CI/CD integration.
• Operate and extend the container and compute platforms (Amazon ECS, EKS/Kubernetes, EC2, Lambda, and serverless services) along with the cluster management, ingress, observability, and security tooling around them.
• Design and operate the cloud networking foundation, including VPC, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, hybrid connectivity to on-prem (Nutanix AHV) and partner environments, Route 53, and edge services, in line with security and compliance requirements.
• Own the CI/CD platform (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or comparable) and the developer platform tooling that speeds up delivery while enforcing required quality, security, and validation controls.
• Partner with Cybersecurity on cloud security engineering, including IAM, KMS encryption, secrets management, GuardDuty, Security Hub, AWS Config, vulnerability management, and SIEM (SIEMonster/Wazuh) integration, and lead remediation of cloud security findings.
• Lead Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, including SLOs/SLIs, on-call rotations and incident response, observability standards (CloudWatch, CloudTrail, OpenSearch, Prometheus/Grafana, distributed tracing), capacity planning, and disaster recovery testing.
• Work with Enterprise Systems, Software Engineering, product, and lab services teams on cloud native solution design, application onboarding, and migration patterns, providing architectural guidance and design reviews.
• Support the regulated environment by making sure cloud platforms, deployment processes, and change control practices align with FDA 21 CFR Part 11, GxP, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 expectations, and contribute to validation, audit, and assessment activities.
• Manage strategic vendor relationships (AWS, IaC and platform tooling vendors, managed service providers) and serve as the senior technical voice in vendor architecture and capacity discussions.
• Build and own the cloud platform roadmap, partnering with IT leadership on multi-year planning, budgeting, and capability investment decisions.

Required Skills

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or a related discipline, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• 10+ years of progressive experience in cloud engineering, infrastructure engineering, platform engineering, or DevOps roles.
• 7+ years of hands-on AWS engineering across core services (EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS/Aurora, DynamoDB, VPC, IAM, KMS, CloudFront, API Gateway, Route 53, CloudWatch, CloudTrail).
• 3+ years of people leadership experience managing engineers (direct reports or formal tech leads), setting goals, running performance reviews, and building team capability.
• Strong, proven Infrastructure as Code experience at scale with Terraform (preferred), CloudFormation, and/or AWS CDK, including module design and reuse, state management, and CI-integrated workflows.
• Deep experience running containerized workloads on Amazon ECS and/or EKS (Kubernetes), including cluster lifecycle, autoscaling, ingress, service mesh, and platform tooling (Helm, ArgoCD, or comparable).
• Experience in regulated environments (FDA 21 CFR Part 11, GxP, ISO 13485, ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA, or comparable) and supporting validation, audit, or assessment activities.
• Strong AWS networking knowledge, including VPC design, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, hybrid connectivity, DNS, edge services, and segmentation patterns.
• Strong cloud security engineering knowledge, including IAM design at scale, KMS and secrets management, GuardDuty/Security Hub/AWS Config, vulnerability management, and integration with enterprise SIEM platforms (Wazuh, Splunk, Sentinel, or comparable).
• Strong Python and Bash scripting and programming skills, plus working proficiency in at least one general-purpose language for platform tooling (Go, Java, or TypeScript preferred).
• Working understanding of observability and SRE practices, including metrics, logs, traces, SLOs, on-call, incident response, blameless post-mortems, and disaster recovery testing.
• Working understanding of FinOps practices, including cost reporting, tagging governance, savings plans, reserved instances, and ongoing cost optimization.
• Familiarity with hybrid cloud integration patterns connecting AWS to on-premises infrastructure (Nutanix, VMware, or comparable).
• Security-first mindset that treats security as an engineering discipline, applies least privilege and defense in depth, and drives findings to closure.

Bonus / Soft Skills

• Master's degree.
• Experience in life sciences, medical device, pharmaceutical, healthcare, or other regulated industries, strongly preferred.
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional and/or AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional, strongly preferred.
• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).
• Strong written and verbal communication, including explaining technical trade-offs to executives and external auditors and writing architecture decision records, runbooks, post-mortems, and roadmap narratives.
• Professional presence and strong interpersonal skills to influence and build consensus on cloud architecture, engineering standards, and platform adoption across all levels of the organization.
• Creative, collaborative, proactive, and self-motivated in executing and completing assigned work.
• Provides day to day guidance and mentoring in a consistently supportive, collaborative way.
• Continuous learning mindset, keeping up with AWS service releases, emerging cloud native patterns, platform engineering practices, and AI-assisted infrastructure tooling.
• Strong critical thinking and sound judgment on ambiguous, cross-functional technical problems with competing priorities and regulatory constraints.

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